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Welcome to Faith of Our Fathers. Today we feature John stott. Born in 1921, he was well known throughout the world for his writings and godly influence in the global church. Stott says that the central message of the Gospel is not the teachings of Jesus, but Jesus himself, the human divine figure. He is always bringing people back to the concrete reality of Jesus life and sacrifice. Today, John Stott presents a message on Easter.

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I wonder whether you remember who it was to whom the first words of the risen Jesus were spoken. I wonder if you remember what those words were and in what circumstances he came to speak them. They were not spoken to the 12, with or without Thomas being present. They were not spoken to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They were not spoken to James, Peter or John, the big three among the apostles? No. They were spoken to Mary Magdalene in the garden of the tomb. And they were spoken in the form of a woman. Why are you crying? Why are you weeping? It seems to me a marvelous providence of God that the first person to whom the risen Lord revealed himself was a woman. It is a marvelous providence of God that a woman was the first person to be commissioned by Jesus to proclaim the good news of the resurrection to other people. It seems to have been a deliberate affirmation of womanhood, since women in those days were not regarded as reliable witnesses. And this privileged woman was Mary Magdalene. The gospels actually don't tell us very much about her. Presumably she came from Magdala in Galilee. Luke tells us that she belonged to a small group of women whom Jesus had cured of diseases or out of whom he had evicted evil spirits, and who, in gratitude for their deliverance or healing, now accompanied Jesus and his apostles and supported them financially. We know all that. According to medieval tradition, she was the prostitute who came behind Jesus in the house of Simon. You remember, Luke records it in chapter seven of his Gospel. She wet his feet with her tears. She wiped them with her hair, she covered them with kisses, she poured ointment upon them. But that is really speculation. The woman in the story that Luke tells is unnamed and unidentified. It may have been Mary Magdalene, but we don't know. What we do know is that Mary stayed by the cross until the very end, until the bitter end. She then followed what we might call the funeral cortege, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and others, to the garden tomb, and she saw him buried. Then she and the other women returned to Jerusalem in order to prepare spices for the further embalming of the body. And some 36 hours later she came back with them and. And this little posse of women discovered that the tomb was open and was empty as well. Mary apparently didn't stay to look in. She was so upset, she turned round immediately, ran back to Jerusalem to tell Peter and John. You'll remember the story, I'm sure. When Peter and John raced to the tomb, she followed at a more leisurely pace. By the time she arrived back at the tomb, they'd gone. And she was alone, weeping. At least she thought she was alone. But when she turned round, she saw through her tears the blurred image of a man. And she thought he was the gardener. I guess it may have been the most dramatic mistaken identity in the whole history of the world. And he said to her with great tenderness, woman, why are you crying? And thinking he was the gardener? She said, sir, if you've taken him, tell me where you put him, and I will come and take him away. And she didn't know that the person she was speaking about was the person she was speaking to. And it was only when he pronounced her name, Mary, that she recognized the familiar voice and fell at his feet. Rabboni, my teacher. In other words, as soon as she knew that he was risen, she stopped crying. And that's my theme tonight. Nothing dries human tears so quickly as the assurance of the resurrection. Now, we've come together tonight in many different moods. I don't have the pleasure of knowing more than a small fraction of you. I can only guess the different moods in which you may have come to church tonight. And if you come in different moods, you come also with different needs. Some of us, I am persuaded, tonight, have secret sorrows. Like Mary Magdalene. There are people here tonight who are weeping either outwardly or if not inwardly. And I'm persuaded also that Jesus, the risen Lord, draws near to you as he drew near to Mary Magdalene. And he asks you the same tender question, woman, or maybe man, why are you weeping? He wants to understand your sorrows in order that the resurrection may bring you relief. Well, why is it that some people weep? I thought it might be good if we could survey together tonight some of the major reasons for human sorrow and try to understand how it is that they can be relieved by an assurance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And the first is this. There are some people who weep over their sins. And I'm so glad they do. Indeed, to be honest, I wish more of us did, because sin and guilt are no laughing matter. Sin and guilt are a weeping matter. And it is, in fact, a healthy thing and not a morbid thing to weep over those things that we said, thought or done that we know very well to be wrong. So Simon Peter knew that. I hardly need to remind you that quite recently he had denied three times that he knew Jesus. And when Jesus turned and looked at Peter and his conscience was stirred, he went out into the night and he wept bitterly. It is a characteristic of our age not to take sin and guilt seriously, to to make light of them. But I'm thankful that the Anglican Church doesn't, at least in the Book of Common Prayer, in the General Confession, we say that we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness. That is, we weep over them because we are profoundly ashamed of ourselves. And friends, if we don't weep now, than we will at the last day. But Jesus warned us very clearly that there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth on the Day of Judgment. But if we do weep now, we may be comforted now by the assurance of God's forgiveness. Why, in the Sermon on the Mount in the Beatitudes, Jesus said, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who weep. And in the context it's almost certainly those who mourn and weep over their sins because they will be comforted. For again, blessed are you who weep now because later you will laugh with the joy of God's forgiveness. So how is it that we can receive this assurance of the forgiveness of God that will turn our tears into laughter? It is the resurrection. I wonder if all of us are clear, as we ought to be clear tonight, that the Resurrection validates the Cross. The Cross does not bring us assurance of forgiveness without the resurrection that validates it. You see, Jesus very clearly said that he was going to die on the cross as a ransom instead of us. He likened the communion cup to the cup of the covenant in his blood. He said his blood was going to be shed for the forgiveness of sins he and his teaching very clearly associated with our sin and his death and the forgiveness of our sins with his death. But how do we know that Jesus was right? How do we know that he didn't make a mistake? How can we be sure that by his death he accomplished and achieved what he said he was going to accomplish and achieve. Answer. We can't be sure if he remained dead. Indeed, if he remained dead, we would have to conclude that he had not succeeded in achieving what he said he was going to achieve by his sin bearing death on the cross, but by the resurrection. God has demonstrated that he has accepted the cross and the sacrifice of Jesus in our place, and that there is forgiveness even for the vilest offender if we do but put our trust in him as the Savior who died for us. God raised him from the dead to give us that assurance that he did not die in vain. So now we can say with the words of Psalm 116, Lord, you have delivered my soul from death and my eyes from tears, and my feet from sin stumbling. So there are some people who weep over their sins, all of assured, until through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we're given an assurance of forgiveness and our tears are wiped away. I hope you know that what a precious gift that is, the assurance of God's forgiveness through the resurrection of the Savior who died for us. Now, secondly, there are others who weep over their troubles. And their troubles may take many forms. Some people are very troubled by their own inner corruption and depravity. Even Christian people. Indeed, the closer they get to Jesus Christ, the more sensitized they become to the horror of their own inward corruption. They feel bruised by the relentless conflict with evil. They even come to God and cry, it is not finished, Lord. There is not one thing done. There is no battle of my life that I have really won. And now I come to tell you how I fought to fail my human, all too human tale, weakness and futility. There are many people who weep over these things, over this inward corruption in their longing for greater holiness. And there are others who weep over troubles of different kinds. The sorrow of loneliness that brings tears to many eyes, the sorrow of bereavement, the sorrow of a broken relationship, the sorrow of the burdens of responsibility, the sense of fatigue that life is altogether too much. And we cry with another psalm. Listen to my cry for help. Do not be deaf to my tears. Put my tears into your bottle. In other words, mark how much I cry. And in answer to our prayers and our tears, the risen Lord again draws near, whispers his question in our ear. Woman, man, young person, why do you cry? Let the resurrection bring to you not an assurance that there will be no more troubles. But the power of the resurrection can give you courage and strength to go on even when you are heavily burdened with your troubles. The resurrection does not remove our troubles. The resurrection wipes away our tears. So there are the tears over sin. There are tears that are wept over our troubles. And then, thirdly, there are yet other people who weep over their fears. Human beings seem to be constitutionally haunted and even tormented by fears of different kind. Now rational fears, now irrational fears. The fear of failure, the Fear of unemployment or bankruptcy, the fear of some incapacity, or again, bereavement, the fear of the unknown and of the dark and of the occult, and particularly the fear of death. The great literature, Dr. Samuel Johnson, you know, once said, no rational human being can die without uneasy apprehension. And I think I can hear Woody Allen saying amen if he ever uses that word. And the Duke of Wellington, who was of course, the great victor at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington is said to have stated once that man must be a coward or a liar who could boast of never having felt a fear of death. It may be the undignified process of dying. It may be the big questions as to what lies beyond the grave. And such fears are more common than most of us concede to the truth. Some people mock at death with false and foolish bravado, thinking that in that way they can overcome their fears. But real fears remain. Even the bravest people weep at funerals because they remind them of their own death. Now, I wonder if you've ever noticed that there is a certain ambiguity in relation to death, even in the teaching of Jesus himself. And if we are following Jesus or seeking to and understanding his teaching, I think there will be this ambiguity in our own experience. Because on the one hand, Jesus rebuked people who were weeping and wailing over the death of Jairus daughter. And he put them out of the room, you may remember. And when he met the widow of Nain, whose only son had recently died, he said to her, woman, weep not. So on the one hand, he is forbidding weeping in the presence of death, but on the other hand, he himself wept at the graveside of Lazarus over the unnaturalness of death and its intrusion into God's good world. And he wept, no doubt out of solidarity with Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, who had lost their favorite brother. So how do you put those two together? He said, don't weep. But he wept himself, surely, because death is an enemy that has been defeated but has not yet been destroyed. It is the last enemy to be destroyed. It is still an enemy, even though it has been defeated by the death and resurrection of Jesus. So it's only the resurrection again that can liberate us from the fear of death. But Jesus Christ is the only person who's passed through death into resurrection on the other side of death and his resurrection both establishes the fact and supplies the pattern of our own resurrection. On the last day, we will rise with a new and glorious body, just as he rose after death. And it's because of the Resurrection, that we need not fear death. So I wonder what our attitude to death is as we think about it. Inevitably, on Easter Day. You know, don't you, the story of how Dietrich Bonhoeffer met his end in the Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945, a few days before it was liberated by the Allies. A man called Payne Best, who was an English officer, told the story of Bonhoeffer's last weeks in the concentration camp. He held a little service that Sunday and spoke to us in a manner that reached the hearts of all, finding just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought. He'd hardly finished his last prayer when the door was thrown open and two evil looking men in civilian clothes burst in and said, prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready to come with us. Those words come with us. For all prisoners had come to mean only one thing, the scaffold. So we bade him goodbye. He drew me aside and said, this is the end, but for me the beginning of life. He then gave me a message. The next day at Flossenburg he was hanged. But this is the end, but for me the beginning. I hope we can begin to say that with confidence in the light of the Resurrection. So let me conclude. My purpose tonight is not to say that there is no place for Christian sorrow. As a matter of fact, I wish there was more Christian sorrow in the church today. Jesus himself was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and sorrow is not incompatible with our Christian pilgrimage. He wept also over the blind stubbornness of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. You remember, and there is much Christian weeping in the pages of the Bible. I think in the Old Testament of another psalm. The psalmist said, streams of tears flow from my eyes because your law is not obeyed. I think of Jeremiah. Oh, that my head were a spring of waters and my eyes were full of tears, that I might weep day and night over the slain of my people, that is under the judgment of God. Paul said the same thing. He said for three years when he was in Ephesus. He ceased not day and night to admonish them with with tears. When did you last see a preacher weeping in the pulpit, not putting on some false sentimentality, but overcome with sorrow over evil in the world and over those who will not repent and turn and put their trust in Christ. There is a place, a bigger place than most of us allow, for Christian weeping and Christian sorrow. Nevertheless, if there is a time to weep, we read in Ecclesiastes. There is also A time to laugh. There is a time for sorrow, but there is also a time for joy. So friends, don't let's keep on weeping over our sins if they have been forgiven. Let the Resurrection give us an assurance that through the death, the sin bearing death of Christ, we have been forgiven. Let's not continue weeping over our troubles in the present, because the power of the Resurrection is available to give us courage and strength. Let's not continue weeping over the fear of death in the future, because the Resurrection gives us assurance of our own resurrection. The past, the present and the future are taken care of by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. So let's hear again tonight the tender inquiry of the risen Lord. Man, woman, young person, why are you weeping? Do not weep. And let's allow the assurance of the Resurrection to overcome our tears. Until that great day when we read in the book of Revelation, God will wipe away all tears from our eyes. Let's pray we have a few moments in which to be quiet in the presence of the risen Lord who says to us, why are you weeping? Do not weep. Let the Resurrection wipe away your tears. Let's bring him our sorrows. Let's confess to him our weeping. Let's ask him to wipe our tears away. We desire to thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, victorious, that you are able to bring us comfort in sorrow and joy in the midst of our tears. And although we do not ask to be delivered from all Christian sorrow, especially tears that have wept over evil in the world, yet we pray to be delivered from those tears that are not necessary because of your death and resurrection. Grant that we may enter into the fullness of your salvation and be assured of it by your resurrection from the dead. Hear us in our prayers for the glory of your great and worthy name. Amen.